Cult rockers bring feedback and anarchy to the Festival Hall
Yo La Tengo Royal Festival Hall, London SE1
It was the right evening for a Yo La Tengo gig. Though the Hoboken indie veterans have always been tough to pin down, dabbling in everything from hazy dream pop to squalling art rock, they’re best known as purveyors of a kind of nourishing, autumnal melancholy. We didn’t have the misty Hudson river, but there was the chilly Thames, and even the odd russet leaf outside the Southbank Centre.
Was it the right venue? The band still favour the hipster cubbyholes they started out in, and I worried that something might be lost in the cavernous (and packed) Festival Hall. I needn’t have. For all their diffidence, the husband-and-wife duo Ira Kaplan ( guitar, mostly) and Georgia Hubley (drums, mostly), along with James Mcnew (whatever needs playing), have the command that comes with three decades of music-making. Throughout the evening, they alternated between drawing us all round the campfire and setting the auditorium ablaze.
In theory, the concert was divided into a quiet bit, then a loud bit. In practice, we often got both at once (as in the shimmering She May, She Might, spliced with a cover of The Urinals’ Ack Ack Ack Ack) but the first part focused on gentler fare. It culminated in the mesmerising
Nowhere Near, which built from a bare guitar and organ hook into a wall of echoes and feedback. That was just a whisper of the second half, where Kaplan frequently took things to the point of anarchy, mashing a keyboard one moment (False Alarm), convulsing over his guitar the next
(Blue Line Swinger), as though it was electrocuting him. Just occasionally I wished he’d step away from the pedals. For the most part, though, it was completely exhilarating.
You might ask what these guys were doing at the London Jazz Festival, but to me it made perfect sense. Yo La Tengo are masterfully unpredictable. “We’ll do some more jamming – a kind of after-hours thing,” said Kaplan just before the interval. I could have stayed all night.